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        <h2 class="fly-title">Cigarettes in films</h2>
          <div class="headline">Smoked out</div>
      <h1 class="rubric">Can a film of a smoker trigger the act?
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      Jan 20th 2011                    | from the print edition          </p>
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<p>FOR beleaguered smokers, the world is an increasingly hostile place. Hounded out of bars and other public spaces, tutted at in doorways and shelters, smokers are now to be found cowering down cold and smelly alleyways. To add to their misery, each day seems to bring a new study showing how vile and dangerous even a whiff of cigarette smoke can be. Could things get any worse? </p>
<p>Possibly, if smokers were also knocked off their comfortable perch within popular culture. For smokers in rich countries have at least been able to rely on films (especially, but not only, classic ones) to portray their habit as somewhat more normal and prevalent than it actually is in the real world. Indeed, Hollywood has long been accused of glamorising smoking, and thereby encouraging people to emulate their on-screen idols. </p>
<p>Research has identified links between smoking in films and the consumption of cigarettes by those leaving a cinema. What prompts such a response is unclear. But it is clearly relevant to those involved in public-health policy. Dylan Wagner and his colleagues at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, therefore decided to investigate the question.</p>
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  <p>They put 34 people, half of them smokers, into a functional-magnetic-resonance imager. Such machines detect changes in the blood flow in various parts of the body—in this case, the brain. In that organ, such changes correspond to increases and decreases in mental activity. Magnetic-resonance imagers are thus, in a manner of speaking, a way of reading minds and are therefore as beloved by advertisers as by neuroscientists. </p>
<p>Participants were asked to watch the first 30 minutes of “Matchstick Men”, a film about con men chosen because it features many smoking scenes but lacks scenes showing the possibly confounding variables of alcohol use, violence and sex. As in many such research projects, participants were misled over the nature of the study and were not aware that it was about smoking. The results are reported in the <em>Journal of Neuroscience</em>. </p>
<p>When smokers viewed a scene that included smoking, they showed greater activity in those parts of the brain involved in perception and in the co-ordination of actions—the areas known to interpret and plan hand movements—as though they, too, were about to light a cigarette. This activity also corresponded to the hand that the volunteer used when smoking. Non-smokers showed no such enhancement.</p>
<p>The part of the brain affected is the home of what is known as the mirror system. This induces, from mere observation, emotions and sensations similar to those induced by actual experience—for example, fear when a large spider is climbing the leg of an actor in a film. That it might provoke a desire to smoke is thus no surprise.</p>
<p>Scott Heuttel, a neuroscientist at Duke University, in North Carolina, says that it has long been known that visual cues induce drug cravings, and that this study builds on a growing body of evidence showing that addiction may be reinforced not just by the drugs themselves but by images and other experiences associated with those drugs. Although smokers trying to quit are advised to avoid other smokers, and to remove smoking-related paraphernalia from their homes, it might not occur to them to avoid films in which smoking is depicted. </p>
<p>No doubt, though, it will occur to society’s nannies to remove the temptation altogether. Expect, on the basis of findings like this, a drive to purge films of characters who smoke. Unfortunately for smokers there is, as a gravelly voice-over might say in Hollywood, “No Place to Hide”. </p>
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